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by sueincc on 07 June 2009 - 16:06
"I am an Obama supporter. I am also pro-life. In fact, without my family's involvement in the pro-life movement it would not exist as we know it. Evangelicals weren't politicized until after my late father and evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer, Dr. Koop (Reagan's soon-to-be Surgeon General) and I stirred them up over the issue of abortion in the mid-1970s. Our Whatever Happened to the Human Race? book, movie series and seminars brought the evangelicals into the pro-life movement.
(Dad's political influence persists. Last week one of my father's followers -- Mike Huckabee -- was interviewed by Katie Couric, along with all the other presidential candidates. Couric asked the candidates if they were to be sent to a desert island and could only take one book besides the Bible, what would that that book be? Huckabee answered that he'd take my father's book Whatever Happened To The Human Race?)
In 2000, we elected a president who claimed he believed God created the earth and who, as president, put car manufacturers and oil company's interests ahead of caring for that creation. We elected a pro-life Republican Congress that did nothing to actually care for pregnant women and babies. And they took their sincere evangelical followers for granted, and played them for suckers.
The so-called evangelical leadership -- Dobson, Robertson et al. also played the pro-life community for suckers. While thousands of men and women in the crisis pregnancy movement gave of themselves to help women and babies, their evangelical "leaders" did little more than cash in on fundraising opportunities and represent themselves as power-brokers to the craven politicians willing to kowtow to them.
Fast forward...
Today when I listen to Obama speak (and to his remarkable wife, Michelle) what I hear is a world view that actually nurtures life. Obama is trying to lead this country to a place where the intrinsic worth of each individual is celebrated. A leader who believes in hope, the future, trying to save our planet and providing a just and good life for everyone is someone who is actually pro-life.
Conversely the "pro-life" ethic of George W. Bush manifested itself in a series of squandered opportunities to call us to our better natures. After 9/11, Bush told most Americans to go shopping while saddling the few who volunteered for military service with endless tours of duty (something I know a little about since my son was a Marine and deployed several times). The Bush doctrine of life was expressed by starting an unnecessary war in Iraq that has killed thousands of Americans and wounded tens of thousands more.
The society that Obama is calling us to sacrifice for is a place wherein life would be valued not just talked about. As he said in his speech delivered on February 6 in New Orleans, "Too often, we lose our sense of common destiny; that understanding that we are all tied together; that when a woman has less than nothing in this country, that makes us all poorer." Obama was talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but his words also apply to our overall view of ourselves.
Regardless of the official position of the Supreme Court on abortion, a country in which all Americans are offered some sort of dignity and hopeful future would be a place conducive to the kind of optimism each of us must hold in our hearts if we are to welcome children into this world. But if our highest aspiration is to be a consumer with no thought or care for our neighbor, we will remain a culture in which abortion is not only inevitable but logical.
What we need in America is a spiritual rebirth, a turning away from the false value of consumerism and utilitarianism that have trumped every aspect of human life. To implement this vision we need leaders that inspire but to do so they have to be wha
by sueincc on 07 June 2009 - 16:06
What we need in America is a spiritual rebirth, a turning away from the false value of consumerism and utilitarianism that have trumped every aspect of human life. To implement this vision we need leaders that inspire but to do so they have to be what they say they are. It's not about policy it's about character.
Obama's rivals for the nomination -- the Clintons -- do not inspire. When the Clintons were in the White House they talked about humane values while Bill Clinton betrayed every single person who voted for him by carrying on an unseemly sexual dalliance in the Oval Office with a young woman barely out of her teens. Since that time the Clintons have enriched themselves through their connections to a point where they're able to make a $5 million personal loan to their campaign.
For someone who says she has spent "the last 35 years of my life as an advocate for children" and/or "fighting for healthcare" that's a lot of money to have collected through doing good works. Presidential Mother Teresa wannabes shouldn't be doing deals with uranium mining outfits in Kazakhstan while schmoozing with the likes of President Nursultan Nazarbayev and wealthy mining magnates -- not if they want the moral authority to lead.
Similarly the Republicans have also been hypocrites while talking big, for instance about their pro-life ethic. But what have they achieved? First, through their puritanical war on sex education they've hindered our country from actually preventing unwanted pregnancy. Second, through the Republican Party's marriage to the greediest and most polluting earth-destroying corporations they've created a climate (both moral and physical) that has scorched the earth for-profit, with no regard to future generations whatsoever. The Republicans are to the pro-life movement what the Clintons are to selfless public service.
The real solution to abortion is to change the heart of America, not the law. We need to stop seeing ourselves as consumers. We need to stop seeing ourselves as me and begin to think of we. Our country needs someone to show us a better way, a president who is what he seems, someone with actual moral authority that our diverse population can believe in who has the qualities that make us want to follow him. Obama is that person."
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD -- How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back
by ziegenfarm on 07 June 2009 - 16:06
pjp
**in regards to this thread, sotomayor has shown herself to be prochoice, sexist, rascist and manipulative of laws and the constitution. no doubt she will be accepted because it serves obama's purpose. i don't know what our country is coming to, but it is not good. our values have fallen by the way side. it used to be that we encouraged ourselves to live up to certain standards, but these days it seems as though we simply change the rules if we can't follow them. (abortion, gay marriage and legalizing pot) the liberals view these changes as "rights." conservatives view them as a degradation of morals and the human spirit. what is wrong with being the best that we can be rather than giving in to every base urge? sotomayor made a horrible mistake in her ruling on the fireman issue. firefighting is a serious matter. this is not the place to be making a stand on racial issues. lives depend on how well a firefighter can do his job......his own life, other firefighters and the lives of victims. only the best should be hired for this job. those that didn't do so well on the test have the opportunity to continue with their education and to retake the test. if they still cannot do well enough to be placed, then they should look into another line of work. sotomayor is risking lives with her judgement. this should not have been a ruling based on race, but should have been decided by abilities.
by justcurious on 07 June 2009 - 17:06
...i want it written in stone that not one penny of my tax dollars will ever facilitate one of these heinous acts. until i can have such a guarantee "it is my business" and the business of every other tax payer in this country. - ziegenfarm
if you can select where 'your' tax dollars can be spent (though i am not for gov funding abortions) then so can everyone else - including those who are anti-war/anti-military, anti-spying, anti-compulsory ed & testing, anti- gov funded celibacy ed program ...
it's a slippery slope and unfortunately until our system of gov radically changes we all have to "tolerate" our tax dollars going to some programs we honestly cannot abide. this is one of the reasons i think all government sucks - regardless of who's in office - and why i encourage anti-abortionist to come up with programs that do not require any gov involvement - stop pushing for new laws and start coming up with legitimate alternatives so those who are faced with a challenging pregnancy have other alternatives to consider.
this is a social issue and not a government issue and as members of this society we need to stop looking to the gov to lead the way instead look to the private sector, to the individual to offer help and guidance instead of trying to legislate morality - which is not the gov job.
by MaggieMae on 07 June 2009 - 17:06
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by ziegenfarm on 07 June 2009 - 17:06
go back and read my initial post (05 june 14:06)
i WAS asking what can i do to help stop this madness? i WAS asking for input/suggestions.
i got NONE. i would love it if i could make contributions to a non profit org that
would freely distribute contraception that people WOULD USE! they don't.
unfortunately, they have chosen abortion as a solution to birth control.
pjp
by justcurious on 07 June 2009 - 18:06
by sueincc on 07 June 2009 - 18:06
"So Newt Gingrich now says Sonia Sotomayor is not a "racist" after all. She must be trembling with relief.
Gingrich's backpedaling came last week in an article on HumanEvents.com. It leaves just two high-profile Republicans, former Rep. Tom Tancredo and radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, still clinging to that absurd allegation.
As you know unless you are just back from Antarctica, this sudden spasm of righteous Republican rage is due to a speech Sotomayor gave in 2001 about the role gender, ethnicity and other characteristics play in a judge's judgment. "I would hope," she said, "that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."
It is, yes, a wince-inducing statement. You might even call it a tone deaf and culturally chauvinistic one. But does it support comparisons to the Ku Klux Klan such as Tancredo and Gingrich have made? Not in a million years.
The attempt to paint Sotomayor as such represents more than political overreach. No, this is part and parcel of a campaign by conservatives to arrogate unto themselves and/or neutralize the language of social grievance. We've seen this before. They sullied the word "feminist" so thoroughly even feminists disdain it. They made "liberal" such a vulgarity you'd never know liberals fought to ban child labor, end Jim Crow or win women the right to vote.
Having no record of their own of responding compassionately to social grievance (ask them what they did during the civil rights movement and they grow very quiet), conservatives have chosen instead to co-opt the language of that grievance. And if what they did to the language of women's rights and progressivism took some gall, what they are seeking to do to the language of race suggests a testicular circumference of bovine proportions.
There is something surreal about hearing those who have historically been the enemies of racial progress define racial progress as looking out for the poor white brother.
And whatever comes beyond surreal is what describes these three men in particular, none of whom has ever been distinguished by his previous tender concern for racial minorities lied upon, denied upon and systematically cheated of their square of the American Dream, telling us "racism" is what happens when a Hispanic woman says something dumb about white men. We are, after all, talking about a man (Tancredo) who once called majority Hispanic Miami "a third world" country, and another man (Limbaugh) who advised a black caller to "take that bone out of your nose."
These are fighters against racism?
You keep waiting for someone to break up laughing. You keep looking for Ashton Kutcher to say you've been punk'd.
But they are in earnest, and there is a pattern here: The forces of intolerance seeking to redefine the parameters of a debate they can win in no other way. Read the treatises that attempt to make Martin Luther King Jr. an icon of conservatism. Read the ones which claim the relative handful of black-on-white violent crime occurring annually in this country constitutes "genocide." Read the mewling of white victimization that rises any time blacks or browns are perceived as having won some victory over discrimination.
There is to it a breathtaking cynicism and a willingness to manipulate for political gain one of the rawest places in the psyche of a nation. The goal is not to persuade. It is to muddy the water, confuse the debate. Because when you can't win the argument, confusing it works almost as well.
Based on one foolish quote, we have spent a week asking if Sonia Sotomayor is a racist. I'd call that mission accomplished. And I wish Kutcher would come ou
by sueincc on 07 June 2009 - 18:06
Based on one foolish quote, we have spent a week asking if Sonia Sotomayor is a racist. I'd call that mission accomplished. And I wish Kutcher would come out already.
It's not funny anymore."
- - -
-Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald. E-mail: lpitts@miamiherald
by MaggieMae on 07 June 2009 - 18:06
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